There is much interest within the medical community for methods and materials for use in reconstructive surgery of tissue. An emerging approach is tissue engineering, in which new tissue is grown from tissue-precursor cells and engineered into desired shapes and structures. The types of tissues that can be grown and engineered include, for example, bone, cartilage, and nervous system tissue.
One of the primary uses for replacement cartilage is to correct defects in the articular surface of various joints. For example, a damaged cartilage meniscus in a patient's knee can be replaced with an artificially engineered meniscus. See, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,041,138 (Vacanti et al.). In other examples of tissue engineering, hollow spaces or lumens within tissues can be filled with tissue-precursor cells suspended in, for example, gelatin, collagen, fibrin, or various hydrogels. See, for example, International Patent Application WO 94/25080 entitled "Injectable polysaccharide-cell compositions" (Griffith-Cima et al.).